#neural interface beta-tester
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Three AI insights for hard-charging, future-oriented smartypantses
MERE HOURS REMAIN for the Kickstarter for the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There’s also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.
Living in the age of AI hype makes demands on all of us to come up with smartypants prognostications about how AI is about to change everything forever, and wow, it's pretty amazing, huh?
AI pitchmen don't make it easy. They like to pile on the cognitive dissonance and demand that we all somehow resolve it. This is a thing cult leaders do, too – tell blatant and obvious lies to their followers. When a cult follower repeats the lie to others, they are demonstrating their loyalty, both to the leader and to themselves.
Over and over, the claims of AI pitchmen turn out to be blatant lies. This has been the case since at least the age of the Mechanical Turk, the 18th chess-playing automaton that was actually just a chess player crammed into the base of an elaborate puppet that was exhibited as an autonomous, intelligent robot.
The most prominent Mechanical Turk huckster is Elon Musk, who habitually, blatantly and repeatedly lies about AI. He's been promising "full self driving" Telsas in "one to two years" for more than a decade. Periodically, he'll "demonstrate" a car that's in full-self driving mode – which then turns out to be canned, recorded demo:
https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-self-driving-was-staged-engineer-testifies-2023-01-17/
Musk even trotted an autonomous, humanoid robot on-stage at an investor presentation, failing to mention that this mechanical marvel was just a person in a robot suit:
https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/elon-musk-tesla-robot-optimus-ai
Now, Musk has announced that his junk-science neural interface company, Neuralink, has made the leap to implanting neural interface chips in a human brain. As Joan Westenberg writes, the press have repeated this claim as presumptively true, despite its wild implausibility:
https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/elon-musk-lies
Neuralink, after all, is a company notorious for mutilating primates in pursuit of showy, meaningless demos:
https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-pcrm-neuralink-monkey-deaths/
I'm perfectly willing to believe that Musk would risk someone else's life to help him with this nonsense, because he doesn't see other people as real and deserving of compassion or empathy. But he's also profoundly lazy and is accustomed to a world that unquestioningly swallows his most outlandish pronouncements, so Occam's Razor dictates that the most likely explanation here is that he just made it up.
The odds that there's a human being beta-testing Musk's neural interface with the only brain they will ever have aren't zero. But I give it the same odds as the Raelians' claim to have cloned a human being:
https://edition.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/01/03/cf.opinion.rael/
The human-in-a-robot-suit gambit is everywhere in AI hype. Cruise, GM's disgraced "robot taxi" company, had 1.5 remote operators for every one of the cars on the road. They used AI to replace a single, low-waged driver with 1.5 high-waged, specialized technicians. Truly, it was a marvel.
Globalization is key to maintaining the guy-in-a-robot-suit phenomenon. Globalization gives AI pitchmen access to millions of low-waged workers who can pretend to be software programs, allowing us to pretend to have transcended the capitalism's exploitation trap. This is also a very old pattern – just a couple decades after the Mechanical Turk toured Europe, Thomas Jefferson returned from the continent with the dumbwaiter. Jefferson refined and installed these marvels, announcing to his dinner guests that they allowed him to replace his "servants" (that is, his slaves). Dumbwaiters don't replace slaves, of course – they just keep them out of sight:
https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/behind-the-dumbwaiter/
So much AI turns out to be low-waged people in a call center in the Global South pretending to be robots that Indian techies have a joke about it: "AI stands for 'absent Indian'":
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain
A reader wrote to me this week. They're a multi-decade veteran of Amazon who had a fascinating tale about the launch of Amazon Go, the "fully automated" Amazon retail outlets that let you wander around, pick up goods and walk out again, while AI-enabled cameras totted up the goods in your basket and charged your card for them.
According to this reader, the AI cameras didn't work any better than Tesla's full-self driving mode, and had to be backstopped by a minimum of three camera operators in an Indian call center, "so that there could be a quorum system for deciding on a customer's activity – three autopilots good, two autopilots bad."
Amazon got a ton of press from the launch of the Amazon Go stores. A lot of it was very favorable, of course: Mister Market is insatiably horny for firing human beings and replacing them with robots, so any announcement that you've got a human-replacing robot is a surefire way to make Line Go Up. But there was also plenty of critical press about this – pieces that took Amazon to task for replacing human beings with robots.
What was missing from the criticism? Articles that said that Amazon was probably lying about its robots, that it had replaced low-waged clerks in the USA with even-lower-waged camera-jockeys in India.
Which is a shame, because that criticism would have hit Amazon where it hurts, right there in the ole Line Go Up. Amazon's stock price boost off the back of the Amazon Go announcements represented the market's bet that Amazon would evert out of cyberspace and fill all of our physical retail corridors with monopolistic robot stores, moated with IP that prevented other retailers from similarly slashing their wage bills. That unbridgeable moat would guarantee Amazon generations of monopoly rents, which it would share with any shareholders who piled into the stock at that moment.
See the difference? Criticize Amazon for its devastatingly effective automation and you help Amazon sell stock to suckers, which makes Amazon executives richer. Criticize Amazon for lying about its automation, and you clobber the personal net worth of the executives who spun up this lie, because their portfolios are full of Amazon stock:
https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5
Amazon Go didn't go. The hundreds of Amazon Go stores we were promised never materialized. There's an embarrassing rump of 25 of these things still around, which will doubtless be quietly shuttered in the years to come. But Amazon Go wasn't a failure. It allowed its architects to pocket massive capital gains on the way to building generational wealth and establishing a new permanent aristocracy of habitual bullshitters dressed up as high-tech wizards.
"Wizard" is the right word for it. The high-tech sector pretends to be science fiction, but it's usually fantasy. For a generation, America's largest tech firms peddled the dream of imminently establishing colonies on distant worlds or even traveling to other solar systems, something that is still so far in our future that it might well never come to pass:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead
During the Space Age, we got the same kind of performative bullshit. On The Well David Gans mentioned hearing a promo on SiriusXM for a radio show with "the first AI co-host." To this, Craig L Maudlin replied, "Reminds me of fins on automobiles."
Yup, that's exactly it. An AI radio co-host is to artificial intelligence as a Cadillac Eldorado Biaritz tail-fin is to interstellar rocketry.
Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/#tailfins
#pluralistic#elon musk#neuralink#potemkin ai#neural interface beta-tester#full self driving#mechanical turks#ai#amazon#amazon go#clm#joan westenberg
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Voiceitt, Amazon Announce Collaboration Between Alexa And ‘Superpower’ Speech Technology
New Post has been published on https://perfectirishgifts.com/voiceitt-amazon-announce-collaboration-between-alexa-and-superpower-speech-technology/
Voiceitt, Amazon Announce Collaboration Between Alexa And ‘Superpower’ Speech Technology
Nat Grupp and his dad.
In a blog post published Thursday, Amazon and speech startup Voiceitt announced a collaboration that aims to make Alexa more accessible to people with atypical speech. Voiceitt is an app that uses machine-learning and speech recognition technologies to help those with speech impairments communicate and be more easily understood.
In a press release, Voiceitt acknowledged the popularity of smart speakers and digital assistants like Amazon’s Alexa—despite their massive popularity, however, they can prove inaccessible to those with various types of speech delays. This can make the communicatively impaired feel as though they are excluded from using voice-first devices. Teaching a machine fluent speech is hard enough; teaching a machine to learn atypical speech is exponentially more challenging. Thus, Voiceitt “recognized the opportunity to expand its technology offering to facilitate not only in-person communication but also interaction with voice activated and controlled devices.”
“We’re excited to work with Amazon to bring the benefits of voice technologies to a broad segment of customers who, until now, may not have been able to enjoy these products,” said Voiceitt co-founder and CEO Danny Weissberg in the press release. “Voice technologies are increasingly mainstream, and this Alexa integration is testament to the growing awareness among major technology players of the importance of ensuring these technologies address the diverse needs and preferences of their customers, including people whose voices deviate from standard speech. Integration of Voiceitt’s speech recognition with a powerful service like Alexa further demonstrates Voiceitt’s value proposition in a rapidly expanding industry, and of our vision—to make speech recognition accessible to everyone.”
Voiceitt, headquartered in Tel Aviv, was born in 2012. The Alexa integration came about through mentorship via Amazon’s Alexa Fund initiative. Launched in 2015, the Fund’s mission is to, according to Amazon, “[invest] in companies that are innovating in AI, voice technology, frontier tech, robotics, and more.” Participants receive up to $200 million in venture-capital funding for product development. The inspiration for the Fund comes from Amazon’s belief that technological experiences driven by the human voice will “fundamentally improve” how people interact with technology.
In an interview with me, Weissberg explained the impetus behind Voiceitt is about empowering independence. The advent of voice-first computing has myriad benefits to people with disabilities, particularly in a smart home context. One of the chief advantages of a disabled person asking a virtual assistant for help is it lessens the reliance on others for help. These experiences go a long way in instilling greater senses of dignity and self-esteem—feelings elicited from heightened levels of autonomy.
The major downside is voice-driven interfaces aren’t usually kind to users whose speech patterns deviate from the norm. That’s what Voiceitt aims to solve.
“Before the Alexa-Voiceitt integration, many individuals with speech and motor disabilities whom we worked with were accustomed to seeking assistance, whether from family members or caregivers, for simple tasks such as turning on the TV or a light,” Weissberg said. “The ability to utilize an Alexa-enabled device independently for the first time using the Voiceitt app will significantly impact the day-to-day lives of these individuals.” He added Voiceitt represents a “life-changing milestone” for many.
How Voiceitt is trained isn’t dissimilar to how one trains a voice-driven UI like Siri, for example. It starts with a simple phrase, followed by repetition of words and phrases several times over. This helps Voiceitt learn the tone and cadence, among other qualities, of a person’s voice. The app then uses artificial intelligence to create a speech model with which it can process a user’s specific commands.
As for Amazon’s role, Weissberg said the company has been consistently supportive. Members of the Alexa team volunteered as mentors during the Amazon Accelerator program, and were excited by Voiceitt’s premise from its earliest days and committed to see the idea come to fruition. “[We] were inspired by Amazon’s commitment to ensuring that the benefits of cutting-edge voice technologies, which they were pioneering, would become universally accessible,” he said.
Peter Korn, who oversees accessibility at Amazon’s Lab126, is equally effusive of Voiceitt’s potential as an assistive technology. “We share [Voiceitt’s] vision to help people with speech impairments live more independently through voice,” he said in Voiceitt’s press release. “We were delighted to support them through an Alexa Fund investment and now through an Alexa integration via their mobile app.”
Weissberg told me early feedback from beta-testers was “overwhelmingly positive and quite moving.” He said testers have grown significantly more independent because of Voiceitt’s technology, accomplishing more on their own than ever before. A recurring bit of feedback was using the app has been a “life-changing experience,” he said. He added Voiceitt and Alexa has enabled people in ways they never imagined.
“Many [testers] report that for the first time, they’re able to join the millions of people around the world who are already using Alexa to control their smart home devices, listen to music and get information using their very own voices—something they never thought would happen,” Weissberg said.
One such tester is Nat Grupp, who’s been part of the Voiceitt pilot program since last year. Grupp, who’s in his thirties and lives in Philadelphia, has cerebral palsy. He has a passion for his hometown sports teams—the Phillies, Eagles, 76ers, and Flyers—and likes to keep tabs on them through the news and by watching games on TV. His condition has made it difficult to move and communicate; his father has long had to help him turn on the television. While Alexa initially was hard to use because the assistant had trouble understanding him, Voiceitt’s technology was a breakthrough. Grupp now can control his home’s lights, Drop-In on loved ones, and keep up with the Philly sports scene—all made possible by Voiceitt and Alexa’s software.
“It feels like a new superpower,” Grupp said in the blog post.
Voiceitt’s work in this realm is game-changing, insofar as it’s heartening to see people recognize speech delays are disabilities too and require accommodation. The mainstream tech press too often has myopic focus when it comes to assessing smart speakers and digital assistants: all they care about are their smarts. Barely any attention is paid to accessibility of any sort, particularly speech-related. Journalists and YouTubers pit Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri against each other all the time to show how intelligent they are, which is valid in and of itself. At the same time, how well they literally understand you is taken for granted; these robots are built assuming normal speech patterns. The thing is, Alexa’s capabilities mean nothing if she cannot reliably parse your speech and do what you ask. Not everyone has the privilege of being able to effortlessly shout into the ether and have their thermostat adjusted. Some people have real problems with these tasks, as Weissberg mentioned. That he and Amazon recognized the need to wholeheartedly address these concerns is a mammoth development for the disability community—one that should be celebrated by the broader technology media. Intelligence is not everything for Alexa and her ilk.
For its part, Apple—as with silicon, the nigh-undisputed industry leader in accessibility—has tried to combat speech recognition issues with Siri in a couple ways. It released Type to Siri to iOS a few years ago, whereby a user can type commands and queries in an iMessage-style interface. While a good solution for certain populations, such as the Deaf and hard-of-hearing, the speech aspect of ambient computing is moot because typing doesn’t actually solve anything, it sidesteps it. As for tackling the actual problem of speech and digital assistants—it’s my understanding, according to sources, Apple has hired speech pathologists for its Siri team in the past to better understand the physiology of speech, and make Siri more graceful with atypical speech.
By contrast, Voiceitt and Amazon are actually taking a page from Apple’s playbook nowadays and applying a truckload of neural engine-y, machine-learning tricks to try to better the user experience in this regard. Maybe Voiceitt inspires Apple’s work.
Weissberg is excited for Voiceitt’s future, telling me “we never imagined just how much we would be able to achieve.” His team eagerly welcomes feedback from users and their families, as making speech-impaired individuals an “integral part” of voice-first computing is a priority. “Bringing accessible technology to people with speech disabilities, together with Alexa, is our main focus for the near future,” he said.
The Voiceitt app with Alexa integration will launch in Q1 2021 on iOS. It is available for pre-order on the Voiceitt website.
From Diversity & Inclusion in Perfectirishgifts
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#4yrsago Apex: final Nexus book merges the drug war with transhumanism
Ramez Naam's Nexus trilogy has concluded with a huge, thrilling, globe-spanning book called Apex that nailed it.
Science fiction is always allegorical, but at it's best, it works as both allegory and plausible futurism, and that's the sweet spot bioscientist Ramez Naam's hit with his first three books, the Nexus trilogy, which tells the story of club kid/neurohackers who change the planet by releasing neural enhancements that allow people to run "Nexus OS" — a free, open operating system — on their own brains.
Naturally, this sparks a moral panic, for all the usual reasons — terrorism, immorality, sex, sybaritic pleasures. More deep and well-played is the fear that Nexus — as well as other posthuman/transhuman technologies, including quantum-computer-based AIs -- are making humanity obsolete, consigning the children of people who don't want to be neural interface beta-testers to the scrapheap of history.
Bruce Sterling defines a technothriller as "a science fiction novel with the president in it." But Naam's 21st century brand of technothrillerism has the president, as well as the Premier of China, the PM of India, and the King of Thailand, and enough geopolitics to go with the action to satisfy any Risk player.
As with the first two volumes, Apex is a fat book that reads like a skinny one, racing through its well-turned plot to a conclusion that ties together every loose thread of every one of the trilogy's cast of thousands. From next-generation protest techniques to warfare in the age of autonomous weaponry to the nature of human rights in a world of transhumanism, Apex has ideas, eyeball kicks, and rollercoaster thrills to spare.
Apex
Review of Nexus
Review of Crux
https://boingboing.net/2015/05/13/apex-final-nexus-book-merges.html
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#3yrsago Apex: final Nexus book merges the drug war with transhumanism
Ramez Naam's Nexus trilogy has concluded with a huge, thrilling, globe-spanning book called Apex that nailed it.
Science fiction is always allegorical, but at it's best, it works as both allegory and plausible futurism, and that's the sweet spot bioscientist Ramez Naam's hit with his first three books, the Nexus trilogy, which tells the story of club kid/neurohackers who change the planet by releasing neural enhancements that allow people to run "Nexus OS" — a free, open operating system — on their own brains.
Naturally, this sparks a moral panic, for all the usual reasons — terrorism, immorality, sex, sybaritic pleasures. More deep and well-played is the fear that Nexus — as well as other posthuman/transhuman technologies, including quantum-computer-based AIs -- are making humanity obsolete, consigning the children of people who don't want to be neural interface beta-testers to the scrapheap of history.
Bruce Sterling defines a technothriller as "a science fiction novel with the president in it." But Naam's 21st century brand of technothrillerism has the president, as well as the Premier of China, the PM of India, and the King of Thailand, and enough geopolitics to go with the action to satisfy any Risk player.
As with the first two volumes, Apex is a fat book that reads like a skinny one, racing through its well-turned plot to a conclusion that ties together every loose thread of every one of the trilogy's cast of thousands. From next-generation protest techniques to warfare in the age of autonomous weaponry to the nature of human rights in a world of transhumanism, Apex has ideas, eyeball kicks, and rollercoaster thrills to spare.
Apex
Review of Nexus
Review of Crux
https://boingboing.net/2015/05/13/apex-final-nexus-book-merges.html
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Apex: final Nexus book merges the drug war with transhumanism #2yrsago
Ramez Naam's Nexus trilogy has concluded with a huge, thrilling, globe-spanning book called Apex that nailed it.
Science fiction is always allegorical, but at it's best, it works as both allegory andplausible futurism, and that's the sweet spot bioscientist Ramez Naam's hit with his first three books, the Nexus trilogy, which tells the story of club kid/neurohackers who change the planet by releasing neural enhancements that allow people to run "Nexus OS" — a free, open operating system — on their own brains.
Naturally, this sparks a moral panic, for all the usual reasons — terrorism, immorality, sex, sybaritic pleasures. More deep and well-played is the fear that Nexus — as well as other posthuman/transhuman technologies, including quantum-computer-based AIs -- are making humanity obsolete, consigning the children of people who don't want to be neural interface beta-testers to the scrapheap of history.
Bruce Sterling defines a technothriller as "a science fiction novel with the president in it." But Naam's 21st century brand of technothrillerism has the president, as well as the Premier of China, the PM of India, and the King of Thailand, and enough geopolitics to go with the action to satisfy any Risk player.
As with the first two volumes, Apex is a fat book that reads like a skinny one, racing through its well-turned plot to a conclusion that ties together every loose thread of every one of the trilogy's cast of thousands. From next-generation protest techniques to warfare in the age of autonomous weaponry to the nature of human rights in a world of transhumanism, Apex has ideas, eyeball kicks, and rollercoaster thrills to spare.
Apex
Review of Nexus
Review of Crux
https://boingboing.net/2015/05/13/apex-final-nexus-book-merges.html
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